The latest news from Google on open source releases, events and student outreach programs.

Perl and Parrot Spread Open Source Love

Saturday, October 23, 2010

The Perl Foundation and the Parrot Foundation took part in Google Summer of Code this year, and as the organization administrator, I am very proud of and humbled by all the students and mentors that I worked with. I am constantly reminded that there are very intelligent developers who are very young, and the Perl and Parrot Foundations are very lucky to attract them and have them in our communities. I firmly believe that the passing Google Summer of Code 2010 projects have had a large positive impact on our codebases and many people will benefit from them for years to come.

We were lucky to get proposals from very bright and capable students. We started the summer with 10 students and had 8 students pass their final evaluations. The passing projects include:

Ryan Jendoubi-- Ctypes for PerlMentor: Reini Urban (Repo)This project is excitingmany Perl developers, because it minimizes the need to use XS, which makes many more pure-Perl modules possible. This improves portability, because XS-based modules are notorious for being fragile across operating systems and compiler versions. This adds up to a whole lot of WIN.

Nat Tuck -- Hybrid Threads for ParrotMentor: Andrew Whitworth (Repo)Threads allow a single program to use more than one CPU, which is becoming increasingly important these days. Even mobile phones are multicore! This work aimed to add threading support to Parrot Virtual Machine. Much was accomplished, but this effort is still on-going. So-called "green threads" were implemented, which is a necessary step to get Hybrid threads working.

Daniel Arbelo Arrocha -- NFG and single-representation strings for ParrotMentor: Allison Randal (Repo)NFG stands for Normal Form Grapheme, and basically means having a standard internal representation of Unicode strings, so that very expensive conversions do not have to repeatedly take place. This makes string-heavy computations much faster and unifies a lot of code.

Pawel Murias -- Mildew and SMOP on CPANMentor: Daniel Ruoso (Repo)This project involved working on Mildew and SMOP. Mildew is a Perl 6 implementation, and SMOP is the library Mildew uses for meta-object programming. You can think of Mildew as a sister to Rakudo Perl 6. Having many implementations of Perl 6 helps to better define the Perl 6 specification. Updated versions of SMOP and Mildew are now available on CPAN.

Both of these projects passed their midterms, but due to circumstances outside of the program, these students were not able to complete their goals for their final evaluation. Sometimes Real Life throws you a curve ball, like starting a new job, moving to a new city, having a baby or similar things. We wish these students the best of luck, and hope that they complete their projects outside the structure of Google Summer of Code.

To all that participated in Google Summer of Code - Rock on and keep spreading the open source love!

By Jonathan “Duke” Leto, Google Summer of Code Administrator for Parrot and Perl